Chapter 23

THE MOUNTAINS AND HILLS are covered with a thick mantle of snow,” Lee wrote Mary’s cousin Markie Williams on New Year’s Day of 1868, “and present this morning a mild representation of Alaska.”

This year, opening in winter silence in Lexington, was to bring the nation the unprecedented convulsion of President Johnson’s impeachment trial. The troubled process of readmitting former Confederate states to the Union continued; by year’s end, only Virginia, Texas, and Mississippi would still be zones of military occupation. In the first presidential election since Appomattox, the Republicans would rely on the newly enfranchised blacks of the South to give them the margin of victory; before the year was out, Ulysses S. Grant, who had become embroiled in one of the crises that precipitated the impeachment trial, would be elected President of the United States.

In Lexington, explosive events were to threaten the life of Washington College. Lee would come to national attention several times during 1868, both as the subject of bitter Northern attacks and astonishing Northern tributes.

 

As the year began, Lee was untouched by the impending political battles. In his office, he finished editing his father’s Revolutionary War memoirs, adding the prefatory biographical sketch of Light-Horse Harry that the publisher, C. B. Richardson, had been confident would guarantee a large sale because it was from Lee’s pen. Neither Lee nor Richardson could know how heatedly the name of Lee would be attacked and defended in the coming months; when Richardson saw that the recent war was being fought all over again during the presidential campaign, he delayed publication for close to two years.

Despite his varied paperwork and usual heavy correspondence, Lee was working hard and successfully on the development of the college. The new chapel, made of brick and native limestone, was almost finished. A new dining hall would soon open; Lee proudly described it as “capable of comfortably accommodating 175 persons.” The library, an empty-shelved wreck three years before, now had five thousand books. A planetarium was bought for the astronomy students; when it had first been offered to Lee in October of 1865, he had made the terse notation “No money” on the letter from its inventor. There were four hundred and eleven students in the college, ten times the number present at the war’s end, and three times as many as enrolled during Lee’s first year as president. A small but growing number were from outside the South.

Lee’s commitment to his postwar career continued to deepen. When one of his generals, Richard S. Ewell, sent the college five hundred dollars with the stipulation that it be used to increase Lee’s salary, Lee wrote Ewell asking that he allow the gift to be used instead for the school’s general endowment, and added, “For my own part I much enjoy the charms of civil life, and find too late that I have wasted the best years of my existence.”

Excellent job offers kept coming to Lee; his son Rob described one as “an offer that he should be at the head of a large house to represent southern commerce, that he should reside in New York, and have placed at his disposal an immense sum of money.” In declining this, Lee wrote something close to a summation:

 

I am grateful, but I have a self-imposed task which I must accomplish. I have led the young men of the South in battle; I have seen many of them die on the field; I shall devote my remaining energies to training young men to do their duty in life.

 

As for those “remaining energies,” Lee was working as much as ever, but his arteries were hardening. One of his former officers, Lieutenant James B. Craighill, now saw him for the first time since the war and said, “He looked twenty years older than he seemed to be as I remembered him in Richmond. His hair and beard were very gray, almost white in fact, and he had taken on so much flesh that he had become quite portly. But with added years had come added majesty.”

Lee was prepared for death; indeed, he expected it to come at any time. In his New Year’s letter to Markie, he spoke of “those eternal shores to which I am fast hastening,” and in urging his new daughter-in-law Tabb to visit them in Lexington he said, “You must not postpone your visit too long, or you may not find us here.”

None of this changed his approach to daily tasks. If death came, in peace as it nearly had in war, it would find him doing exactly what he thought he ought to be doing. All that he was planning at his desk and discussing with the faculty and trustees was costing money and would require even more of it, and he was pleased to see a new and particularly promising source of money on the horizon. A fund-raising meeting for Washington College was to be held in New York City at the beginning of March. Scores of prominent New Yorkers were to attend; a crowd of five hundred potential contributors was expected. It was a Northern tribute to Lee’s conduct since the war and a statement of support for Southern education in this difficult time. The fact that such a meeting could be held in the cily where a crowd had shouted “Hang Lee!” three years before showed that an increasing number of Northerners were in a magnanimous mood and were willing to believe that the leading enemy general of 1865 could be an important friend in 1868. The master of ceremonies and principal speaker was to be Henry Ward Beecher, the nation’s best-known and best-paid preacher, who had been one of the first Northerners to perceive and to hail Lee’s conciliatory postwar actions and attitudes. Washington College needed Henry Ward Beecher far more than he needed it, and his support symbolized the good fortune that now seemed to attend the school into which Robert E. Lee daily placed so much effort and hope.

 

All the good intentions of the friends of Washington College were about to be blasted by an incident of seemingly limited importance. A fracas in Lexington was to give Washington College and its leader a bad press as far away as Boston and Chicago.

On the afternoon of February 4, a Union Army veteran named E. C. Johnston went skating on the long stretch of ice above the dam on the North River. It was a cheerful, peaceful scene of children shouting and young men skating up beside girls whose faces were flushed from the cold, but Johnston’s appearance on the ice changed things. He was thought of as a particularly meddling Yankee, who taught in an American Missionary Association school for blacks and ran a store that was considered to be a carpetbagger intrusion into the local economy. Johnston was well aware of all this hostility; although no one had physically attacked him in his more than two years in Lexington, he carried a concealed pistol, and had it with him even for this outing on the ice.

As soon as he got onto the ice, all the nearby skaters deliberately turned their backs on him. Johnston skated down the river for more than a mile, alone. Turning a bend, he found a new crowd of skaters, including town boys and Washington College students. These greeted him with catcalls when he passed. As he came back the way he had come, several youths skated toward him, shouting, and a twelve-year-old boy came up to him and yelled into his face, “You son of a bitch!”

Johnston grabbed the boy with one hand, drew his pistol with the other, and told the terrified lad that he would shoot him if he used those words again. As Johnston let the boy go and skated off, the entire crowd surrounded him, cursing and shouting “Hang him!” He was told to leave town and was warned that if he said anything to the authorities about these threats, men would come to his store and lynch him. Johnston scrambled up the riverbank, pelted with chunks of ice and stones that caused some bumps and bruises. That night a group of men appeared in front of his store, pounded on the door, banged the shutters, cursed, and eventually went on their way.

The next day, Johnston started complaining to the authorities. Within a few days, a major general of the occupation forces was in Lee’s office, armed with the names of three students who were alleged to have been involved. After the general left, Lee called them in; two admitted to being in the altercation and were told by Lee that they would be leaving school, and the third, who had been present but took no part, asked permission to withdraw from the college and was granted it. The major general sent a report to the adjutant general’s office in Washington, closing the case and adding, “Mr. Johnston is partly to blame himself, as he threatened to shoot one of the small boys when they first set on him.”

Johnston soon packed up the stock of his store and left for Covington, Virginia, claiming that word had been sent him that he and his store were to be the destination of a riotous nighttime student march. As far as he and his friends in Lexington and elsewhere were concerned, he had received no justice in Lexington and insufficient protection from the United States Army. They intended to complain about all this and to criticize the students of Washington College and its president. They were going to write letters, and their timing was remarkable.

II

Eight days after the major general’s report was written about the incident on the ice, and two weeks before the scheduled fund-raising meeting for Washington College in New York, Lee’s name was suddenly the subject of a sharp dispute on the floor of the United States Senate. The abrupt exchange had nothing to do with recent events or with Washington College and, in fact, had little to do with what the Senate was debating. Nonetheless, at this moment when the House of Representatives was about to vote that the Senate bring the President to trial for “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and every legislator was exercised about the underlying issues of Reconstruction and the political fate of blacks and whites in the South, it was not a good time for Lee to have his name mentioned in any manner.

The Senate was arguing whether to seat Philip F. Thomas, the properly elected junior senator from Maryland. The Radicals did not dispute that he had been legally elected, but they were refusing to let him serve on the grounds that he had consorted with Confederates right to the outbreak of the war and that his son had served in the Confederate Army.

The Radicals were to succeed in rejecting this senator, but in the course of the debate on his actions on the eve of war, examples were given of other men’s behavior during those same April days of 1861. Senator Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, who had then been Lincoln’s secretary of war, rose to state what he believed to be the facts concerning Lee’s conduct at that critical hour.

When Lee was offered command of the Union Army, Cameron said, “it was accepted by him verbally, with the promise that he would go into Virginia and settle his business and then come back to take command. He never gave us an opportunity to arrest him; he deserted under false pretenses.”

That was exactly the reverse of the truth: Lee had declined the offer when it was made by the government’s go-between, who was not Senator Cameron. Though he had been secretary of war, Cameron had not been present on that occasion, nor had he been present when Lee had his final painful talk with the army’s seventy-four-year-old commander, his friend and mentor Winfield Scott. “I suppose you will go with the rest,” a staff officer in the corner heard Scott say to Lee, making it clear that Scott understood that the man he had called “America’s very best soldier” was about to join the other Southerners who were resigning. Indeed, Scott understood Lee’s intention so well that he urged Lee to resign quickly, and within forty-eight hours Lee did.

On the Senate floor, nearly seven years later, here was. this matter-of-fact statement that Lee had lied and deserted, made by a man whose position at the time seemed to guarantee the accuracy of what he said. It was about to enter the nation’s records as undisputed fact.

The senior senator from Maryland rose. He was Reverdy Johnson, no relation to the President but, like him, a Southerner who had remained loyal to the Union during the war. Now he found its Reconstruction policy harsh and impractical. As a Democrat, he was under almost constant fire from the large Republican majority in this chamber, and today, fighting a losing battle to get the Senate to accept the credentials of the junior senator from his state, the last thing he needed was an additional duel about a man whose name was anathema to the Radicals. Although he was a friend of Lee’s, Senator Johnson did not know what had happened when Lee ceased being a colonel in one army and in a few days appeared as a general in an opposing one; at that time few people did know. Nonetheless, he was certain that Lee could never have lied, never have deserted, and he met the charge head on. With just one question, he extracted from Cameron the admission that he had not been present when Lee made his alleged promise to fight for the Union. Cameron went on to insist, however, that his information came “through a gentleman who had my confidence and in whom I relied entirely.”

“That is another matter,” said Johnson, who had cross-examined many a witness in his younger days as a lawyer. It was hearsay evidence, and Johnson emphasized this by saying of Lee’s supposed pledge that he would lead the Union Army, “The statement was not made to the honorable member.”

On the defensive, Cameron replied, “I have no doubt of its truth.”

“That I am equally sure of,” Johnson said, “but I doubt very much its truth. It is not in keeping with the character of Lee.”

This word on Lee’s behalf brought a derisive laugh from Senator John Conness of California, happily joined in by many others.

Johnson turned and faced the Republican side of the aisle. “Gentlemen may laugh, but I say to the honorable member from California, who engages in merriment, that General Lee is as honorable a man as any to be found in the State of California. He has offended, that I admit.”

 

By the time Lee saw the transcript, the Senate was preparing for the trial of President Andrew Johnson. Nonetheless, Lee felt compelled not only to thank his senatorial defender, but also to put on paper for the only time his account of the matter. He identified the offer of command of the Union Army as coming from Francis Preston Blair, Sr., a Republican leader, the conversation being “at his invitation, and, as I understood, at the instance of President Lincoln.”

Lee explained his decision simply. “After listening to his remarks, I declined the offer he made me, to take command of the army that was to be brought into the field; stating, as candidly and courteously as I could, that, though opposed to secession and deprecating war, I could take no part in an invasion of the Southern States.”

Lee then mentioned his interview with Winfield Scott and his resignation, saying that he still “hoped peace would be preserved; that some way would have been found to save the country from the calamities of war.” Thousands could have testified to what happened next: Virginia seceded; the North was clearly going to march on the South; Lee accepted command of Virginia’s forces when he was asked to do so.

If Lee thought that with this letter he had cleared his name from public criticism and could look forward to a quiet spring with his family and students, he was mistaken.

 

Known as “the handsomest man in the Army,” this was First Lieutenant Robert E. Lee of the Engineers at the age of thirty-one. This portrait was painted by William E. West in Baltimore in March of 1838, and was the first picture of any kind made of him. Lee graduated from West Point in 1829, was married in 1831, and at the time of this portrait was the father of three children. (Washington and Lee University)

 

RIGHT Painted by West at the same time as the portrait on the preceding page, Lee’s wife, Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee, was twenty-nine. The great-granddaughter of Martha Washington and sole heiress to thirteen thousand acres of Custis land, she was exceptionally well-read, and spoiled and headstrong. (Washington and Lee University) RIGHT General Ulysses S. Grant, in a picture made by the noted photographer Mathew Brady in 2864. The surrender terms Grant offered in April of 1865 impressed Lee as being extremely generous and honorable. From the day of his surrender until his death in 1870, Lee never allowed an unkind word about Grant to be spoken in his presence, and in 1869 he accepted President Grant’s invitation to call on him at the White House. (Library of Congress)

 

BELOW By the close of the Civil War, Mrs. Lee had become an arthritic invalid who bitterly condemned the Federal government for its Reconstruction policies and for its confiscation of Arlington, her family home. This photograph was made in Lexington, Virginia, by Michael Miley, a Confederate veteran. (University Library Archives, Miley Collection, Washington and Lee University)

 

ABOVE Union soldiers stand in front of the massive portico of Arlington House, the Custis mansion in which the Lees lived many of the years before the war. Standing on a bluff overlooking Washington from the Virginia side of the Potomac River, the house and its eleven hundred acres were seized by Federal forces in the first days of the war, and became Arlington National Cemetery. (National Archives)

 

 

A Northern artist named A. R. Waud had been following the Union armies, and quickly made this sketch when Lee rode away from the McLean House at Appomattox Court House, where he had just signed the surrender terms. It is the only record of the occasion made from life. Note the Union officer at left raising his hat to Lee as he passes by on his famous horse Traveller. (Library of Congress)

 

Lee on “the day but one” after he returned to his rented house in Richmond following his surrender at Appomattox Court House. Mathew Brady had been photographing the Union Army during the war; now he appeared and asked Lee to pose for him. “It is utterly impossible, Mister Brady,” Lee answered. “How can I sit for a photograph with the eyes of the world upon me as they are today?” Brady asked a friend to intercede with Mrs. Lee, and soon Lee reappeared and said, “Very well, Mister Brady . . .” (Library of Congress)

 

The Lees’ oldest son, Major General Custis Lee. A bachelor, on his father’s death in 1870 he succeeded him as president of Washington College, then renamed Washington and Lee University, and served in that position until 1897. In 1883 the United States Supreme Court ruled that the wartime confiscation of Arlington had been illegal, and Custis, who had been the rightful heir to that estate, accepted the government’s offer of $150,000 for the property. (Collection of Mrs. Hunter deButts)

 

Mary, the Lees’ oldest daughter. Sharp-tongued, fond of the outdoors, she was noted for a fearlessness exemplified by her taking solitary walks through a countryside where robberies were known to occur. Like her sisters, she was intelligent and well-read; also like them, she never married. (Collection of Mrs. Hunter deButts)

 

The Lees’ second son, Major General W. H. F. Lee, known to one and all as Rooney Lee. A kindly and popular man, given to running up debts while at Harvard, he was stricken by tragedies. His two children died in infancy, and his beloved young wife died while he was a wounded prisoner of war. After the war, during which Federal forces had burnt his house, he married happily and began a family whose descendants are alive today. (Collection of Mrs. Hunter deButts)

 

Captain Robert E. Lee, Jr., the Lees’ youngest son. He started the war as a private in the Rockbridge Artillery, and on the battlefields of both Second Manassas and Antietam his father failed to recognize him because he was so covered with dirt, powder, and sweat. Like his brother Rooney, Rob farmed the remaining Custis lands after the war and started a family that carries on the line of Robert E. Lee. (Collection of Mrs. Hunter deButts)

 

Some of Lee’s students. This is the first group picture of the Kappa Alpha Order, founded at Washington College in the autumn of 1865. From this handful of young men, all but one of them Confederate veterans, there grew a national fraternity dedicated to the emulation of Lee’s character. At present there are more than seventy thousand living members. The student on the left of the front row was the Order’s guiding spirit, Samuel Zenas Ammen, a veteran of both the Confederate Army and Navy and later editor of the Baltimore Sun. (Kappa Alpha Order)

 

The historic colonnade at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia. Except for the structure on the right, Lee would have seen all these buildings when he arrived in September of 1865 to become president of what was then Washington College. His first office can be identified by the open window on the second floor of the building on the left. (Washington and Lee University)

 

Lee’s second and final office, in the basement of the chapel whose construction was one of his first priorities. It was here that he talked to students whose grades or behavior troubled him. One of them later wrote, “An invitation to visit General Lee in his office was the most dreaded event in a student’s life.” Everything in the room, including the papers on the table, has been left just as it was on the day he fell fatally ill. (Sally Mann Photo, Washington and Lee University)

 

The house on the campus where the Lees lived during most of his presidency, from late 1865 until June of 1869. Then they moved into the new President’s House, a handsome larger structure built for them next door by the school’s trustees. (Washington and Lee University)

 

Every day that he could, Lee went for a long ride on Traveller in the late after noon. This lithograph is based on a photograph made by Michael Miley in 1866 at the Rockbridge Baths, eleven miles from Lexington. (Michael Miley Collection, Washington and Lee University)

 

Mildred, Lee’s youngest daughter. Neither Lee nor his daughters were aware of how possessive he was, or of how much they acquiesced in that possessiveness. After his death, Mildred wrote, “To me he seems a Hero—and all other men small in comparison!” (Collection of Mrs. Hunter deButts)

 

Agnes, the prettiest of the Lee daughters. Breaking off her romance with Confederate Colonel Orton Williams, whom the war had turned into a hard-drinking and violent man, she was soon stunned by the news that he had been arrested within Union lines wearing a United States Army uniform, and hanged as a spy. A friend called it “a shock to Agnes from which she never recovered.” (Collection of Mrs. Hunter deB utts)

 

Taken in 1869 at the White Sulphur Springs resort in West Virginia now known as the Greenbrier, this is the only photograph, wartime or postwar, that shows Lee with a group of his generals. Lee is second from the left in the front row. His generals, all of them standing behind him, are, left to right: Brigadier General James Conner of South Carolina; Brigadier General Martin W. Gary of South Carolina; Major General J. Bankhead Magruder of Virginia; Brigadier General Robert D. Lilley of Virginia; General P G. T. Beauregard of Louisiana; Brigadier General Alexander R. Lawton of Georgia; Brigadier General Henry A. Wise of Virginia; and Brigadier General Joseph L. Brent of Maryland. The men in the front row are, left to right: Blacque Bey, Turkish minister to the United States; Lee; George Peabody of Massachusetts, the greatest philanthropist of his day and a contributor to Washington College; W. W. Corcoran of Washington, D.C., another donor to Lee’s school and the man who gave the nation the Corcoran Gallery of Art; and Judge James Lyons of Richmond, Virginia. (Valentine Museum, Richmond, Virginia)

 

The last painting from life of Lee was done by the colorful Swiss artist Frank Buchser, whose visit to Lexington in the autumn of 1869 is not mentioned in previous biographies. Buchser had hoped to have Lee dress in his Confederate uniform, but Lee declined to do so, saying, “I am a soldier no longer.” Lee compromised by displaying on the table next to him the dress sword, sash, and coat he had worn when he surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, and a wartime hat and a pair of binoculars. This painting, the most original and interesting portrait of Lee, was sent to Switzerland and stayed there. (Kunstmuseum Bern)

 

One of the last photographs of Lee, probably made soon before the trip south for his health in the spring of 1870, a journey that turned into a series of large and wildly enthusiastic ovations. A comparison with the Brady portrait made just after Appomattox shows how dramatically Lee had aged in five years. During that time he did more than any other American to heal the bitterness between North and South. (Michael Miley Collection, Washington and Lee University)

 

This picture was taken during Lee’s funeral at the college chapel that he had been so eager to build. The young men in grey are cadets from the neighboring Virginia Military Institute. Note the wide black ribbons of mourning on the building to the left. (Michael Miley Collection, Washington and Lee University)

 

The head of the statue of Lee lying in Confederate uniform above his tomb in the Lee Chapel at Washington and Lee University. It was carved by Edward Valentine, who, as a young sculptor, went to Lexington and did a bust of Lee from life. Each year thousands of visitors come to the chapel in which Lee worshipped daily with his students. (Washington and Lee University)